Ingres

View Current Viewing Revision #6 from 11/30/2018 2:56 p.m.

Ingres is an open-source relational database management system (DBMS) designed for large-scale commercial and government applications. Actian Corporation currently oversees the development of the database while providing certified binaries and support. The latest version is Ingres 11, which is also known commercially as the Actian X Hybrid Database.

History

When two University of California, Berkeley professors, Michael Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, read the papers about System R at IBM in 1973, they became interested in applying the concepts in those papers on a research project of their own, and thus Ingres was born. From its birth to 1985, Ingres was a research project at the University.

In the mid-1980s, Ingres competed against Oracle in the then-emerging relational DBMS market. These two systems were considered to have comparable functionalities and performance, and were the market leaders. However, from then on, Ingres slowly lost market share to Oracle presumably due to the latter's more aggressive marketing, and more importantly, the recognition of SQL as the go-to query language, which Ingres did not use at the time. It used a query language called Quel and the transition to SQL took three years. Nevertheless, Ingres reincarnated as the underlying source code of many commercial databases, one of the most well-known being Relational Technology Inc, founded by the very same two professors who started Ingres as a research project. The company was later renamed Ingres Corporation in the late 1980s, and continued to provide commercial database products with Ingres lying underneath. Although Ingres never achieved the same market prominence as its once head-to-head contender Oracle, it endured over the years and was the inspiration for many other popular database management systems, such as Postgres.

In 2011, Ingres Corporation was renamed Actian Corporation and has continued its support on the classic DBMS since then. It is currently branded as the Actian X Hybrid Database.